After the Office 2010 launch: Companies with OEM, Retail, or Volume licenses for Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 or Office 2003 Professional

Now that Office 2010 is available to all Volume Licensing customers, I received an inquiry from a Partner for an updated chart on what qualifies for the up-to-date discount at this time during the N-2 promotional period (which ends in June, 2010). As such, here is the updated chart showing what qualifies for the Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 N-2 UTD offer now that Office 2010 is available:

For those of you asking yourselves, “Wait, does this mean that Office XP no longer qualifies?” The answer is, “Yes, that is precisely what this means.” As stated in my original N-2 announcement post, N-2 means that the only versions that qualify are the current version (N) and two versions prior (N-1 and N-2). With the release of Office 2010, the current version now is Office 2010. This makes N-1 Office 2007 and N-2 Office 2003. At this point, Office XP has become 3 versions old (N-3), so it no longer qualifies for the N-2 promotion.

With this in mind, you might also want to consider that as I announced in January, the N-2 promotion runs through June, 2010. After that point, the promotion ends and we return back to the standard N-1 qualifying versions for the UTD discount through Open Value Subscription. As such, the N-2 versions would no longer qualify (Office 2003 versions), so only the N (Office 2010) and the N-1 (Office 2007) versions will qualify. What this means is, if you have clients on the 2003 versions of Office today, you should really have a conversation with them prior to June to see about taking advantage of the N-2 promotion for their business to take advantage of the savings it provides as well as the other benefits of Open Value Subscription. (I have many of the benefits included in this post).

I have a question I'll bet you were never asked - I have a customer under Open Value Subscription for Office 2007 and they're current.

They "used" their Office 2003 OEM licenses when they started the subscription for the up-to-date discount. They have an employee who is leaving the company and taking their company owned laptop with them - the company is "selling" the asset to them.

We will be uninstalling Office 2007 from that machine. Can we reinstall the OEM version of Office 2003 that originally came with the machine? Or is that license "consumed" by the up-to-date discount for OVS?

@ DiPersiaTech - Thanks for the question. Actually, the question of, "Can we transfer an OEM Office license to another PC" is one that I see quite a bit, which is ultimately what your question is. Natively, OEM Office has no transfer rights whatsoever. The only way to be able to transfer an OEM Office license is to add Software Assurance within 90 days of the OEM Office license purchase. Here's a link to a post specifically on this: http://bit.ly/cXOgTi